I breathe with him because we’re still falling. We haven’t hit the ground yet. I know that the moment we do, I won’t be able to breathe at all.
“He said if I won, he would never talk to her again. He was just starting in NASCAR then, and I have never been one to turn down a challenge, much less the chance to make my brother look like a pussy, so I said okay. I’d invested eleven years of my life into this woman. I was willing to do anything.” His voice cracks. “I don’t know who told her what we were doing or where we were doing it, but somehow she showed up just as we took off. She jumped in her car and followed us, thinking she could stop us or some shit. I don’t fucking know.” He rakes a hand through his hair and sighs. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking past me like the whole scene is playing out before his eyes somewhere across the lake. “Levi and I had been racing each other since before either one of us was legal to drive. She knew that, but it didn’t stop her. Maybe she thought it was her fault. Maybe she didn’t realize that we were just brothers being brothers. She was mine. Whether I won the race or not. Rebecca was mine. She always had been.” His voice is completely pain-ridden, and I see it when I look at him. It’s still there, the unconditional love he has for her, for a ghost, a ghost who cheated on him with his own brother. My anger about that—the cheating, not the grief—is overshadowed by my need to console him.
How could anyone ever think this man wasn’t enough for them?
He swallows and clears his throat. “Anyway, we took a turn. She didn’t. Her car skidded off the road and down the side of a hill. I don’t know how many times she flipped, but…” His voice trails off at the end.
I squeeze his hand. “You don’t have to finish.”
“The autopsy showed she was pregnant. It might have been mine. It could have been Levi’s. I won’t ever know. Don’t want to. In my mind and in my heart, I lost two of the greatest things to ever happen to me that day.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry,” I whisper, my voice weak as tears fall down my face—tears for him, for Rebecca, for their unborn child, for a future I now know I’ll never have.
He wipes them away with the pad of his thumb. “I don’t need you to be sorry. I just need you to understand.”
Understand. Understand that this is why he’ll never love me. We are Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale. We’re Gatsby and Daisy, Anna Karenina and Vronsky. We’re the romance that was never meant to be.
I muster the strength to smile up at him. “I get it. I understand.”
Blaze never misled me. He didn’t spoon-feed me a bunch of lies. He never promised me anything more than this, the physical. He told me exactly what this is before I ever agreed, and I promised him I was strong enough to handle it.
That was before I knew him.
He looks at me, and his eyes aren’t distant anymore. They are no longer focused on the past. They’re focused on me, on every part of me. Is it even possible to feel both elated and heartbroken at the same time?
His hands inch down my body, then grab my ass and pull me against him. “Good. Now I need you to make me forget.”
He slips his hand inside my bikini bottoms, and I let him. I let him because even though every single part of me is telling me that Blaze is a hurricane and I am a tree, he needs me. He needs me to stop the hurting.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was right.
Right now, the pain is irrelevant, but when this ends, it’s going to rip me apart.
Adrienne ran her fingertips over my past. Literally. She traced the outlines of the pain etched into my skin. I opened up old wounds and shared them with her, and she stopped the bleeding. She didn’t offer me a light. She walked up and sat beside me in the dark—Indian-style, with that goddamn sexy ass smile and that way she has of making you forget everything but her name.
It’s been almost a week since I took her out on the lake, and I can still taste her skin on my lips. She shared parts of her past with me. I showed her my demons, and she didn’t run from them. That was one of the best days of my life—tasting her, touching her, fucking her while we were out there on the water.
Love isn’t a choice. You don’t decide you want to fall in love one day then walk up to a vending machine and make your selection. I’ll take brunette with a firm ass, great sense of humor, and a divine pussy, please.
Love isn’t calculated.
It’s unexpected.
It’s a chance meeting and an instant connection.
It’s that moment when you look into their eyes or memorize the curve of their smile and think, This is it. I’m fucked.
Adrienne makes me feel things. She makes me feel all the fucking things, out loud and in vibrant color. I don’t know if it’s love—I’m not sure I’m capable of that anymore—but I do know it’s pretty damn close.
I didn’t need her to tell me she’s sorry. I’m so fucking tired of people telling me they’re sorry. I needed her to see past the hurt, past the pain, and understand that this is me, scars and all. I needed her to understand that she’s only getting half a man and be okay with that.
I also need her to understand why I don’t want her anywhere near Levi.
Which is why when Hector told me—Haley told him—that Adrienne was taking the boys to Charlotte Motor Speedway today to watch my brother race, I flipped my shit.
Now, here I am eating popcorn and drinking shit beer while overlooking turn three and waiting for a chance to politely remind my brother to stay away from what’s mine. By politely I mean threatening bodily harm—but doing it with a smile. I have a feeling if Adrienne knew I was here, she’d be politely reminding me she can handle shit herself. I probably should have told her. Then again, she didn’t tell me she’d be here today, so there’s that.
A guy in a blue Number 48 T-shirt scoots past me as we all look to a huge American flag waving in the distance and sing the national anthem. The announcer starts talking about the weather then introduces the drivers. The rumble of the cars grows louder as they make the first turn. People begin to put on earphones, the bulky over your head kind, and hold their cell phones up to record the cars when they make the first fly by.
It’s been years since I’ve been to a racetrack. The mere thought of racing makes my stomach turn. The fact that I’m even here right now tells me I’m more pussy-whipped than I thought.
As soon as the race is over, I go find Levi. He’s wrapping up a post-race interview on victory lane.
I walk up with a slow clap and a shit-eating grin. “Congratulations, Big Bro.”
“Blaze.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “I thought… The other night when you saw me… It just seemed like—”
“Like I wanted nothing to do with you?”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“Good. Because I don’t. I’m here to tell you to stay the fuck away from Adrienne. I don’t know what angle you’re playing with this sponsor bullshit, but I mean it.” I step into his space, close enough to snatch him by the throat and steal the breath from his lungs if I wanted to. “Stay. The fuck. Away.”
“There’s no angle. Everyone in the racing circuit knows about Corporate Cares. Lots of us want to be a part of it.”